The Other WithinFrom "The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche" by Daniel DeardorffPosted by: DailyOM

Every human being, in the inﬁnite variety of body and soul, comes into this world so unique and so alike, with so much promise—each one prepared and appointed for the best … It’s not going to happen. The promise of life will break—early or late, far and away from the life that might have been—we fall, and thus, we are betrayed.

Crushed and broken, this anomalous, aberrant, unimaginable shape of life, strange to the eyes of the pack, if not concealed, means a life of exile. Although, as will be shown, this betrayed condition is ultimately the condition of everyone, there is the considerable matter of degree. Not to establish a comparative hierarchy or heroics of “woundedness,” but simply to make the case herein by reference to its most conspicuous exemplar: the Outsider amongst us—the one with no escape from …
That deﬁling and disﬁgured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eye until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape…
‘Wisdom’—the vision of doom or being doomed to vision—begins in the unforeseen catastrophe which strips away life’s promise, reduces hope to ashes, and leaves one castaway in the original darkness. Consciousness stripped down to nothing; what remains is what we are.

What remains is the “hierophany of betrayal;” here is the violent strike of a Thunderbolt—the irrevocable summons to a deeper life—and for a few, the hard-won discovery that the very instrument of betrayal, the Thunderbolt which afflicts them, is also the soul’s invincible core.

‘Hierophany’ (hier = sacred, phany = manifestation) according to Mircea Eliade: “designate[s] the act of manifestation of the sacred.” In addition, he remarks, “It is a ﬁtting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us.”2 The hierophany, in terms of the present work, is the personal experience of undifferentiated sacrality: the Gnostic inﬂux—in-formance—of “divine energies,” which shape and orient the whole being to accord with an ever shifting cosmos. Again, in Eliade’s words: “The hierophany reveals an absolute ﬁxed point, a center.”3 However, this coming to center is not the beatiﬁc “silver lining,” the dawn after the night, the light at the end of the tunnel—it is the lightning-bolt-trident of Shiva, by which life is destroyed and created at once.

Moreover, for those thus stricken, the hierophany perpetuates and redoubles the circumstance of betrayal; if our society marked us as undesirable before, now wielding the de-structuring Thunderbolt, we shall be anathema.

‘Betrayal’—to be traded, delivered, handed over, no longer held, dropped—is the crisis of a rupture in the veil of the ordinary-life. A violation in which we are in-formed by assault: dis-possession, dis-appointment, dis-ease; every indignity, every wound, every curse, every tragic fall brings us to this crossroads.